Utilitarian-by-proxy

[Vocab clarification: utility is a term used by economists to refer to general wellbeing. It is nothing to do with the more common use of utility to mean usefulness.]

I took a course in ethics during my masters degree in economics. It is probably one of the best things I ever did. During that course my lecturer asked how an economic utility curve could possibly represent utility when a person makes a decision which harms themselves out of a sense of duty.

I saw no contradiction whatsoever in a measure of wellbeing which conflated forms of happiness. I decided that not carrying out that act of seeming altruism would leave that person worse off than carrying it out. They were still acting to maximise their own utility in some form and the analysis remained sound. I was a fully paid up graduate economist and I was towing that line.

A few years later my boss told me that speaking to a friend, this friend had related to him a little story that the friend felt demolished the economic valuation of nature.

"Take a bowl with two oranges in it. Now you sell the oranges for 60 pence. You then take that 60 pence and buy apples at 30p each. The bowl now contains two apples. Economics thinks oranges and apples are the same thing."

He was suggesting that comparing the natural environment to other traded goods was like comparing apples and oranges. This I thought more ridiculous, the apples aren't the equivalent of oranges, we are just willing to trade one for the other at that particular time.

These two anecdotes raise lots of interesting questions which I don't intend to get into: is anything truly altruistic, does economics think we can sell all the environment to the highest bidder...

All I do want to point out is something that a generalist reader might think un-extraordinary but which seems to really piss off economists. All modern capitalistic economic thinking relies heavily on a moral ethics which is entwined in everything which is done. Many modern economists think that they are amoral observers like astronomers observing planets. They are not.

The form of well-being gained from caring for an Alzheimer sufferer are certainly different from those gained eating ice cream. Economics does something rather clever in saying that we cannot disentangle these different forms of happiness, we will not even call what we are aiming to study happiness but come up with a new word. An economist will look at individual utility and how economics can be used to help that individual to make choices which will maximise that utility. When we say that an individual left to their own devices will aim to maximise this broad definition of wellbeing it simplifies the question from unobservable activities in the mind to externally observable activities. I.E. we can see how much ice-cream they're buying.

If we assume that a good market is one that sells everything; that growth in the global economy is desirable; that people know what is best for them; that reaching a point at which no person can be made better off without making any other worse off is "efficient", that we ought to maximise net utility... Or to put it another way if "“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation”...

Then economics continually and implicitly follows a set of moral principles and is at its core a moral philosophy. Baby-economists walking hung-over, soft-skinned and virginal (well maybe that was just me) into their first microeconomics lecture are brought into a utilitarian fraternity and our pliable minds don't even notice.

I walked past his corpse most days I went for my ethics course. Jeremy Bentham was a heroic thinker, we should at least reference to poor waxy faced old zombie.